Summer is upon us once again, and parents are beginning to plan for their children's days without a school schedule. Dreams of days filled with family, friends, freedom and laughter are in students' heads as they say goodbye to another school year. However, a nonacademic summer can cause students at every grade level to digress two to three months in their academic skills. Half an hour to an hour set aside daily can help students close learning gaps and perform at higher levels during the upcoming school year. Summer is an ideal time for students of all ages to strengthen their academic skills while still having plenty of time left over for summer activities.

1. Make Time for Learning

Set aside time for your student to read each day during the summer break -- 15 to 30 minutes per day is all it takes! During the summer, students have more time to read for enjoyment, which also offers a great opportunity to preserve and strengthen their reading skills. Your summer activities should include taking your children or teenagers to the public library to check out books of interest and/or any summer reading groups they'd like to join.

A great way to track how much reading your child is doing during the summer months is a tally on your regular activities calendar. This will help keep the daily reading time from being overlooked because of other summer activities -- and we know there are many!

Parents of students reading below grade level should read with their children in order to assist with sounding out words they might not be able to decode themselves. In addition, keep a dictionary or online source close by to help students figure out those words by using the phonetic spelling provided.

2. Learn and Practice Affixes

Children and teens of all grade levels can improve their reading and spelling skills by learning affixes. Most multi-syllable words include prefixes and suffixes added to a base word. You can find a list of affixes and their meanings in a dictionary or in many online sources. To make this practice appealing, turn it into a game! Students can create flashcards of prefixes and suffixes. On the reverse side of each affix flash card, they should write the meaning. All children love guessing games and can point out what they think the affix means. You can also use this game to help them learn new vocabulary words.

3. Develop Math Skills

Though it may not seem fun to them at the time, working on just three to four math problems per day during the summer can prevent students' mathematical skills from getting rusty. They can look at it as a daily challenge that they must complete, or a daily "to-do" to proudly check off their calendar. Parents can purchase a math workbook for their child's academic level at most bookstores. Working on just a few problems daily (or more, if your child enjoys math) can help students of all ages close the gaps in their math skills, preserve what they learned during the previous school year, and prepare for the next.

4. Improve Reading Comprehension

To help your children better understand what they're reading, consider offering them a reading comprehension workbook to work on several minutes daily. These can be found at teacher supply stores or many online outlets. Students of all grades and ability levels can benefit scholastically by working with material that offers self-quizzes and high-interest stories. This practice helps develop their fact-retaining and inference-making skills.

5. Review and Build Grammar Skills

Review the past grade level's grammar concepts, and begin to work on the next school year's concepts. During the summer, students benefit from weekly reviews or pre-learning two to four lessons. Find workbooks geared to their grade or skill level, and encourage them to check their work using the answer key provided. Even if they make mistakes on their answers (and who doesn't make mistakes?), finally filling in the correct answers will reinforce their grammar skills.

6. Encourage Creative Writing

Creative writing is a great way to improve your children's written language skills while giving them a fun and imaginative activity during the summer! Have your student write a creative paragraph each week. As a parent, you can help by assisting him or her with choosing a "topic" (such as a family vacation, special outing or holiday memory) to write a paragraph about. Students can also benefit from using a thesaurus and changing several common words to more interesting words. This will make their writing more interesting while learning great new words at the same time.

7. Focus on Specific Skills

Pinpoint the subjects your child had the most trouble learning the previous school year, and make sure to fit in some practice in these areas. Summer is an ideal time to set aside just 15 to 30 minutes a day for helping your student on areas of difficulty. Again, use every resource available to you! Parents are not helpless when it comes to their child's education. Online resources and teacher supply stores offer a wide variety of learning materials, workbooks, computer games, and other types of games to reinforce and strengthen scholastic skills. Students may wish to play learning games with their friends to help make the time fly by and make learning more fun.

Over the summer, students and parents who practice the above tips can see great strengthening and improvement in scholastic skills, and avoid digressing two to three months in learning. Summer learning can be fun and challenging at the same time. Students may find learning to be more fun as they become more capable of meeting scholastic challenges and overcoming any learning weaknesses. By implementing a summer plan and igniting your child's passion for learning, he or she can enjoy a renewed sense of academic self-esteem and dignity -- wonderful benefits of learning not to be "counted out."

I am excited to see someone posting ideas on how to curb summer loss of education! I am amazed at how much loss occurs over the summer due to the lack of reading, quick math skills, etc. I wish more parents would follow this and work to improve student learning!

Kids need all academic skills to truly follow their curiosity, whether it involves following a sports team (just think of all the math in baseball!), documenting sky activity (June 24 super moon), growing a garden, birdwatching, tracking video game progress, Cooking and creating new recipes--even fractions are necessary and in a recipe they taste good. They can journal their findings every day, make plans for the week, communicate with friends and family via email (Grandma would love that!) Write fiction and illustrate it! Become a film critic, writing reviews. Academic skills only serve the purpose of expression and curiosity. A long block of time is perfect for this.

You hit on a great point with way #3. Studies show that students can lost up to 20-25% of their math retention over the summer months. We feel that digital learning resources can help prevent that summer math slide.

Thank you for this blog. I get asked at the end of each year, "what can I do this summer to prepare my child for the next school year?", and this blog has given me some ideas to share. I especially like Melanie's ideas to make the real-life connections when suggesting academic skills. I'm a big promoter of writing letters in the summer as a tool for practicing grammar. I'm glad that some suggestions were made to involve sports, as the boys are usually tougher to reel in to academics. Melanie, I completely agree that "academic skills only serve the purpose of expression and curiosity." I now have more suggestions to give parents when the concern of summer retention and academic practice is mentioned at conference time.

Thank you for this information! My district is currently building a new school campus so our students will have a 3 1/2 month summer vacation! The students and staff were extremely excited about this, however we are all a bit worried about what the students will lose over the long break. Your suggestions will be fabulous to share with parents as I plan to send a packet of information and work to each family from my classroom to practice over break. Thanks for your suggestions!

These suggestions I find very positive to help our students during the summer,, especially those who has external exams next year . I have recommended to our school administrators that we email the article to all our parents and students. Then to keep the interventions active we would send progression tips every two weeks. For example practice questions and answer for the students to work with.

This is great information! I agree that this is something that could easily be printed out and given to parents at the end of the school year. The tricky part is getting the parents on board! I know there will be some that will be all for it while others (usually the parents of students who are struggling already) who will sadly choose to ignore the letter.

This is such a wonderful list of ideas on how to help students avoid academic loss over the summer. Not only will I be recommending these ideas to my students' parents, I will share them with my colleagues so that they can also suggest them to their parents. Working together provides for even more opportunity to reach all learners and focusing on ways to incorporate academic activities throughout the summer will definitely play a hand at improving student learning the next school year.